This year, we’ve thrown our hat into the ring for the 2010 Forrester Groundswell Awards, which recognize social technologies that advance organizational goals. We’ve nominated our semantic tool built to search through Twitter in the B2B category. Our technology helps companies “hear” what customers are really saying. Please read on to get a quick overview of the Twitter website, a look at how it works and some additional information about our involvement in the Twittersphere.

Background on the Expert System Twitter Semantic Search Site
The Twitter semantic search application is designed to quickly and accurately isolate relevant information in hashtags, conversations and individual tweets. Whether Twitter users are discussing a relevant product, service or issue, companies need a way to monitor these conversations to see what the public is saying and make informed business decisions.

Because our Twitter search site leverages our COGITO semantic software, it’s able to interpret tweets with natural language processing and understand their nuances as a human would, all in real-time. To give a few examples:

• The search application is able to equate the terms “huge traffic jam” and “hge trfc jam.”
• It recognizes differences in sentiment and cause and effect. A tweet that states “high blood pressure contributes to heart disease” is interpreted and recorded differently than one that states “heart disease contributes to high blood pressure.”

These capabilities give a vast advantage over the keyword search model, which eliminates relevant results that don’t contain a few exact words, and the inefficient manual search, which is costly in terms of time.

For additional information on the Expert System Twitter Semantic Search site, please refer to the press release announcing the site. You can also read this article from Semantic Web, in which I offer some additional insight into the problems that the Twitter website solves as well as practical uses for this technology.

How the Twitter Semantic Search Site Works
In order to analyze the results of a particular Twitter search, the web based service generates a graph to visually represent its findings. For example, below is a graphical representation of the tweets about Disney, which gives the viewer a real-time snapshot of how the company is discussed in the Twittersphere.

More specifically:

• The X axis represents time, underscoring the website’s real-time search results. In an effort to keep results as current as possible, each search looks at tweets from the past hour.
• The Y axis represents the quantity of tweets that mention Disney in a particular context.
• The dots on the graph represent the range of subtopics that relate to the main search term. For this graph, we can see that Disney was discussed in the context of cinema, TV, tourism, music, commerce, etc.
• The size of the dots represents the number of users that have covered each subtopic.
• With this in mind, each dot’s position along the X axis indicates how recent tweets about a particular topic are, and its position on the Y axis demonstrates how strong the association is between the search term and that particular subtopic.

The same graphs can be generated to view analysis of a particular hashtag or for the individual tweets of one influential Twitter user. The site can also generate user maps and topic clouds. To get a better sense of what this would look like, let’s examine the following graph, which represents Lance Armstrong’s individual tweets over the course of one hour.

• As with the Disney graph, the X axis gives us a timeframe—when during the last hour Armstrong tweeted about specific topics.
• The Y axis indicates how common certain topics were among Armstrong’s tweets.
  – Specifically, of the topics that Armstrong discussed in the last hour (identified in the legend below the graph), the Y axis indicates that themes like sports, work and finance were the most popular.

For additional insight, please refer to our online demo of the site’s functionality.

COGITO Semantic Software
With the Twitter COGITO Search now in context, let’s backtrack for a moment to get a closer look at the COGITO platform, the software at the core of all our technology solutions.

• COGITO is a revolutionary semantic indexing, search and analysis tool for the management of strategic internal and external information.
• Unlike most search technology, it automatically understands the true meaning of words in the same way that humans are taught to read and understand.
  – By understanding the context and relation to other words in a sentence, COGITO ensures the correct meaning of the word is interpreted.
  – For example, the software is able to differentiate between jaguar the car and jaguar the animal.
• These capabilities allow users to monitor, search and automatically correlate information crucial to their businesses, pulling data from multiple sources including databases, documents, articles, email, Web pages, etc.

Keeping this background in mind, you can also read thorough this article, to take a deeper dive into the relationship between semantics and social media.

For Your Reference
To see the other ways in which we engage in the Twittersphere, we invite you to visit some of our senior staff on Twitter:

J. Brooke Aker, CEO of Expert System USA – http://twitter.com/brookeaker
Luca Scagliarini, VP Strategy at Expert System – http://twitter.com/scagliarini
Rita Joseph, VP Federal Sales at Expert System USA - http://twitter.com/msritajo
Julie Hartigan, CTO Federal Programs at Expert System USA - http://twitter.com/juliehartigan
Bill Porter, Business Development Director, Expert System UK - http://twitter.com/pointer5005
Francesca Spaggiari, PR and Marketing Manager at Expert System – http://twitter.com/fspaggiari

Many technology companies have managed to flood the market with their “magic” automatic solutions. They promise precision tools which are simple to use, have enticingly colorful dashboards and provide full coverage of “consumers sentiment” with minimal effort. Many of their web sites state that once top executives are equipped with their magic tool, the task of reading and interpreting the extracted data can be easily delegated to their subordinates.

As I am directly involved with this aspect with my company, I can’t seem to figure out if this claim is just an aggressive marketing campaign or if it is just a way to tell customers what they want to hear. Either way, it has created a situation where the only dialogue with the potential customers is based on looking at the data contained these reports and trying to find the errors in the extraction, thus casting doubts on whether the technology is actually ready for the market.

This vicious cycle needs to be stopped. It could be useful to remember the following guidelines to create a more productive climate and provide value both to businesses and to technology companies:

1) Online sentiment analysis is just another element of competitive intelligence and should be handled accordingly
2) Even the more established technologies (ERP, BI, CRM) are not perfect and do have a margin of acceptable error
3) A group of analysts should be employed to examine the data, extract the knowledge and scan the sources
4) Set priorities and be conservative: avoid incidents first
5) Learn how messages propagate

Do you remember the song, “Change the World”? It was recorded by Eric Clapton and won a Grammy Award for “Song of the Year”. There’s no doubt that we can change the world, but sometimes we just can’t accept the idea that world can change us as well. This is especially true in the business world; we trust the notion that change is needed in order to grow and progress, yet we aren’t usually very fond of it (some say this is a sort of unconscious, unresolved conflict between our intelligence and our emotions.)

In the last year, the concept of monitoring consumer opinions expressed online in forums, blogs, and social networks became a very popular topic, not only for management and industry press, but also for mainstream media. Several incidents have caused the reputations of companies and government organizations to take a beating. Some have even had their image completely destroyed by videos posted on YouTube (Domino’s Pizza), online rumors or email campaigns. On the positive side however, the companies which implemented focused and innovative viral marketing campaigns were able to profit considerably by using these same mechanisms proactively. What this tells us is that having access to online opinions about products, brands and people is more than just a passing phase. It is a strategic variable for all organizations (have you read this report about Toyota’s crisis?)

While executives seem to be increasingly aware of this aspect, the majority of them do not seem to place the same value on this issue as they would for other strategic business variables. Activities involving business intelligence are dealt with using a mix of technologies, databases and analysts (internal and external to the organization), yet this new variable of competitive intelligence is treated superficially, without engaging sufficient resources. It certainly can’t be easy to face these sorts of challenges, but I believe it all boils down to what I said in the beginning: it’s not easy to change the way you work. Furthermore, as intellectual and emotional factors continue to build up, the situation tends to become even more complicated then it actually is.

There is a bright side to all of this, however. First, we can allow the world change us and let things happen by themselves. Change doesn’t have to be “the thing to do” because it is driven by outside forces (because markets change or because consumers needs change, etc…); it can be something natural and simple. There are lots of people out there willing to change, sometimes with the help of other people. Thankfully, for a company like Expert System, there are a lot of people that embrace the idea of changing their lives - or maybe just their companies - by exploring new technology.

Here’s some food for thought: we start to change only when we start to think differently. (BTW, did you know “Change the World” was also chosen as one of the Songs of the Century? Ranked #270.)